PET Image Reconstruction for Pharmacokinetic Modeling of 5-[18F]Fluorouracil in Liver Tumors

Three different PET image reconstruction techniques were evaluated to quantita­tively measure the 18F-labeled cytostatic agent 5-fluorouracil (5-[18F]FU) in liver metastases of tumor patients: the standard filtered back-projector and two iterative algebraic algorithms with successive overrelaxation for accelerated convergence. Forward-projected activity distributions with different counting statistics were simulated using random number generators based on Poisson processes. The algebraic algorithms were numerically stable with the calculated concen­trations uniformly converging to the theoretical values. The lesion contrast improved with the number of iterations, but was accompanied by increasing image noise. More than 80 iteration steps were necessary to accurately quantify the drug 5-[18F]FU in the metastases (error ≤ 20%).

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